Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The most inhabitable planet ever has been discovered! This news will be important until the next most inhabitable planet has been discovered. That should be in about a week.

Kepler-186f circles a red dwarf (and not the BBC series, you idiot) star 500 light years from Earth, and it's rocky. Very rocky. But it's in the Goldilocks zone (the area far enough away from a star that a planet won't be too hot year near enough for it to be warm enough to possibly support life) and might possibly maybe have water. Yet it's quite cool and 'probably basks in an orange-red glow'.

Yep. So have many of our cousins. And we similarly have glown (glown?) on far too many occasions ourselves.

Will ya stop already about finding life on other planets? From 500 light years away (the distance light would travel in 500 years at 186,000 miles per second; Second, we add for dramatic emphasis) Kepler-186f is one hell of a long way away. We'll never actually see nor interact with it.

But it might house life. Some kind of life anyway.

Ah, life. Spoken as though any kind of life equals human, sentient, self aware life. You're a bacteria? You're life! We're equals! You're like us. So tell me, what is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

Well, it's not merely finding any old kind of life on any old kinda planet. Our own world is teeming with life; we know this. It is not conjecture. It is not wishful thinking. There's no reason to be particularly excited that such life might exist somewhere else in the universe. It would be on the same moral plane as we find ourselves, especially if such life is sentient. It simply is not critical to our own scientific or philosophic, nay even to our theological, knowledge that other planets might have life.

We're not saying not to look. We're not saying that it wouldn't be interesting to talk to someone from 'out there' if that someone exists. But it would not be the most stunning event in our history. We would reserve that for something like curing cancer, thank you very much. All else would be no different than finding another organism right here at home, or when people of our own Earth came across other humans they did not previously know existed. We need to stop talking as though life, the universe, and everything would really be any different should we be able to converse with a Keplerian.